Armie Hammer’s Attempted Comeback Is Weird and Inevitable (But also Kind of Failing)

It was a surprise to literally nobody that Armie Hammer, actor and accused sexual abuser, has started making his comeback into public life. After becoming the focus of several very serious accusations, as well as some oft-mocked texts that revealed some unexpected sexual fetishes, he disappeared from the public eye and was last reported to be selling timeshares on the Cayman Islands. Now, he’s dipping a toe into the age-old cycle of the non-apology public rebirth tour. He wants you to know that he’s a changed man but also that he didn’t rape anyone and that he’s not a cannibal. But he did once brand a woman. So, can you hire him to be a movie star again?

Certainly, Hammer’s been eager to talk up how much big-name support he’s had since being accused of rape (and I want to keep hitting home that detail because too many people think this was about the cannibal DMs and not sexual assault.) Robert Downey Jr. reached out with some advice. Johnny Depp’s also been in touch, in-between schmoozing with Ed Sheeran and Russell Crowe, because everyone’s forgotten that he lost a libel case in the UK and that you can legally still call him a wife beater on this side of the Atlantic.

The cancel culture industrial complex certainly revealed itself in tedious fashion when Hammer stepped towards the mic for his comeback tour. Piers Morgan, a man who has never knowingly engaged in journalistic ethics, had him on his TalkTV show (an online-only series because the service, courtesy of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, was removed from traditional broadcast this May due to poor ratings.) Hammer joined the illustrious ranks of Kevin Spacey and the stalker who inspired Baby Reindeer in receiving Morgan’s line of faux-indignant softballs that were designed solely to pander to people who think the female M&M got too woke. The same could be said for Bill Maher, who also welcomed Hammer with open arms as part of his continued efforts to make the cheapest shots possible at anything vaguely progressive but with the least possible effort. You could fill out your bingo card with these appearances and their blunt affirmation of every exhausting anti-cancel culture trope. It’s clear that neither Morgan nor Maher were interested in the very real accusations of sexual assault that have been levelled at Hammer. Such things are an inconvenience that distracts from the lazier goal of mocking a made-up demographic they’ve built their careers on mocking.

None of it made Hammer seem any more sympathetic, though. In reality, his ‘I may have committed light branding; admittance, as our own Mike Redmond put it, veered into Tim and Eric-style anti-comedy surrealism. It bore echoes of Spacey’s self-righteous appearance on Morgan’s show where he casually admitted to nonconsensual touching of others while defending himself against several credible accusations of assault. The eagerness to go against ‘wokeness’, however it is defined by the loudest tyrants, is also merely Plan B for the ultimate aim of attention at any cost.

In this market, of course the Armie Hammer comeback is inevitable. Society hates those who speak out against sexual assault and it loves making money, and they’ve spent a hell of a long time enforcing a system wherein the former leads to the latter. Class solidarity is profitable, by and large. When you have money, it’s far easier to sidestep the misery of the majority. With Hammer, an old money heir whose pre-scandal Hollywood image was built on a kind of classic leading man charm with just enough of a freaky edge to keep things interesting, his image was entwined in this net. Trying to come back from being the dude who got mad at a Buzzfeed writer for a critical profile to the penitent man who just wants to make an honest day’s living is a lot harder when everyone still associates you with being a spoiled boy. It’s not impossible, obviously. Mel Gibson did it. Louis C.K. is doing fine. Johnny Depp is stinking up the place.

But all of this has exposed how limited the routes are for this sort of comeback. Notice that Hammer isn’t going to the trades or the broadsheet newspapers. He’s not sitting down with Gayle King or Isaac Chotiner. He’s hanging out with Piers Morgan, a man who is utterly incompatible with the notion of basic human decency, on an internet-only show that is increasingly becoming known as a platform for trainwreck interviews. He is going to these places because nobody else will have him, at least nobody who would press him on the actual issues. Surely it’s only a matter of time before he’s on Joe Rogan’s podcast? He is on a route defined almost exclusively by a hard-right political firebrand philosophy that has turned imaginary culture wars into a verifiable hate movement. This isn’t the road back to Hollywood. At best, it’s a U-turn to Ben Shapiro’s vanity movies or hosting an acting masterclass in a church basement in Estonia.

Can one take something positive from this realization? Maybe. He’s certainly not getting the red carpet rolled out for him, and even if Robert Downey Jr. is taking his calls, I can’t imagine him ruining his Emmys campaigning by letting Hammer in one of his projects. There will always be work. Even the most mediocre talent can get a gig, especially if the braying anti-woke crowd thinks it’ll make a point. I can already see Hammer in some Daily Wire hackery making Hannibal Lecter jokes with the pained effort of a has-been TV star doing his 17th convention of the year. What comebacks like his desperately seek is a return to the undisputed height of his career, a time when he could be a legitimate Oscar contender and have big-name directors send scripts to his agent. That dream is limited by reality, yes, but also the fact that Hammer was never an essential figure in the business. There’s no nostalgia for him and he’s not considered one of the greats. We have Glen Powell now. There’s a ceiling on his kind of comeback, but he’s still a white dude in entertainment at a time where punishing victims is a successful business endeavour, so that ceiling is higher than most of us desire. Don’t take this mess too seriously until he’s invited for a sit-down by Variety, at the very least.